Stand on the riverside promenade in central Shanghai and you face two centuries at once. Behind you, along a curve of the Huangpu River about a mile and a half long, runs a wall of granite banks, trading houses, clubs and hotels built between the 1900s and the 1930s. Across the water rise the towers of Lujiazui. The Bund, known in Chinese as Waitan, is the most famous waterfront in China and one of the most photographed in the world. It is also one of the most politically charged, a monument both to foreign privilege in the treaty-port era and to Shanghai’s modern prosperity. This article traces its history from a muddy towpath beside the Huangpu to today. It covers the Treaty of Nanking and the 1845 Land Regulations, the taipans and their banks, the HSBC building, Customs House and Sassoon House, Bloody Saturday in 1937, nationalisation after 1949, the 1990s return of the banks and the 2010 renovation, noting where popular stories and the historical record diverge, not least over the ‘No dogs or Chinese’ sign.
Mudflats and a towpath
Before the 1840s the stretch of riverbank north of Shanghai’s walled county town was not a city at all. It was low, marshy land with reed beds and tidal mudflats, crossed by creeks and dotted with fields and graves. Along the bank ran a towpath used by trackers who hauled boats against the current, and it was this path that would become the foundation of the Bund. Shanghai itself was already a busy port, handling coastal and river trade, but its commercial life was concentrated around the old city and its riverfront to the south.
The names reflect this geography. The English word “bund” came from Hindustani, where it meant an embankment or dyke, and it travelled to China through British commercial networks in India and Canton, where it was used for embanked waterfronts in several treaty ports. The Chinese name Waitan means “outer bank”, distinguishing this stretch from the riverbank closer to the old city.
The Treaty of Nanking and the British Settlement
The First Opium War ended with the Treaty of Nanking, signed on 29 August 1842 aboard a British warship on the Yangtze. It ceded Hong Kong Island to Britain and opened five ports, including Shanghai, to British trade and residence. Shanghai was formally opened on 17 November 1843 after the arrival of the first British consul, George Balfour. The site of the foreign community was then negotiated with the local Chinese intendant, or daotai, Gong Mujiu.
On 29 November 1845 Gong promulgated the Land Regulations, the founding document of the British Settlement. They allowed British merchants to lease land in an area bounded by the Yangjingbang creek to the south (now Yan’an Road), a line near today’s Beijing Road to the north, and the Huangpu to the east; a western boundary was fixed the following year along what is now Henan Road. The regulations also required the riverside towpath to be kept open as a public way, which is one reason why the Bund always had an open strip between the buildings and the water. Chinese residents were at first expected to leave the area, but the idea of a purely foreign enclave did not last.
The first foreign firm to register a lot on the waterfront, Lot No. 1, was Jardine, Matheson and Company, which had begun trading in Shanghai in 1843. Its site became No. 27, the Bund, where the firm stayed for more than a century. Early buildings were modest two-storey “compradoric” houses with verandas, combining offices, warehouses and living quarters, set back from a still muddy riverfront.
From British Settlement to International Settlement
The settlement grew in fits and starts, driven as much by crises in China as by trade. When the Small Swords Society seized the walled city in 1853, and later when the Taiping Rebellion swept through the Yangtze delta, tens of thousands of Chinese refugees poured into the foreign settlements. Landlords made fortunes building housing for them, and the principle of segregation collapsed. In 1854 a revised set of land regulations created the Shanghai Municipal Council, an elected body in which voting rights depended on property and which was dominated by foreign merchants.
A French Concession was established in 1849 south of the Yangjingbang, with its own waterfront, the Quai de France. An informal American settlement grew up in Hongkou, north of Suzhou Creek, and in 1863 it merged with the British Settlement to form what became known as the International Settlement. The Bund was its front door. The history of the Settlement as a city, its policing, its refugees and its cosmopolitan population, is explored in this site’s article on Old Shanghai and the International Settlement.
Physically, the Bund was improved in stages. The riverbank was embanked and extended with reclaimed land, jetties were built for launches serving ships moored in the river, and a strip of lawn and trees was laid out along the water. At the northern tip, on land reclaimed beside the mouth of Suzhou Creek, the Public Garden opened in 1868. Beside it the Garden Bridge, the forerunner of today’s steel Waibaidu Bridge of 1907, linked the Bund to Hongkou.
The taipans and the hongs
The people who built the Bund were merchants. The heads of the great trading houses, or hongs, were known as taipans, from a Cantonese term for a big boss. Jardine, Matheson had made its early fortune in the opium trade from India to China, as had the Sassoon family, Baghdadi Jewish merchants based in Bombay whose firms, David Sassoon and Company and later E. D. Sassoon and Company, traded opium and cotton and established themselves in Shanghai in the mid-nineteenth century. Butterfield and Swire, the Kadoorie family and many banks and shipping firms joined them. The wider story of these firms is told in this site’s article on the great foreign hongs.
Chinese merchants and compradors, the Chinese managers who handled a foreign firm’s dealings with Chinese markets, were essential to this world and often grew rich themselves, but for decades they were excluded from the Municipal Council. Chinese members were only admitted in 1928, after years of pressure. The Bund’s grandeur rested on a system of extraterritoriality, under which foreigners were tried by their own consular courts rather than Chinese law, and on the military power of the treaty powers, which kept warships in the Huangpu.
The great rebuilding
Most of the buildings seen today date from a burst of reconstruction between about 1900 and 1937, as the old veranda houses were replaced by steel-framed stone buildings in classical, Beaux-Arts and later Art Deco styles. Many were designed by the British firm Palmer and Turner.
The grandest was the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation building at No. 12, completed in 1923. With its dome, colonnaded facade and an entrance hall decorated with mosaics depicting the zodiac and the great banking cities of the world, it was said at the time to be the finest building between the Suez Canal and the Bering Strait. The bank’s own story is told in this site’s article on HSBC. Next door, the Customs House at No. 13 was completed in December 1927 for the Chinese Maritime Customs Service, the foreign-run agency that collected China’s customs revenue. Its clock tower, with a clock and bells made in England and modelled on Big Ben, became known as “Big Ching”.
Jardine, Matheson rebuilt its headquarters at No. 27 in 1922. In 1929 Sir Victor Sassoon completed Sassoon House at No. 20, on the corner of Nanking Road, with the Cathay Hotel on its upper floors and a green copper pyramid roof that became a Shanghai landmark. Sassoon, who took over the family business in the 1920s and moved its base from Bombay to Shanghai around 1930, became the city’s most prominent property developer. Noël Coward is reputed to have written Private Lives while staying at the Cathay.
The last great prewar project was the Bank of China building at No. 23, next to Sassoon House, designed by Palmer and Turner with the bank’s chief architect Lu Qianshou and topped out in 1937. Its Chinese-style roof was a statement that a Chinese bank could compete on the Bund. A popular story holds that it was originally planned to be much taller but was cut down because Sassoon objected to anything rising above his building; the story is widely repeated but hard to verify and should be treated with caution.
The “Paris of the East”
By the 1930s Shanghai was one of the largest cities in Asia, a financial centre, the home of China’s film and publishing industries, and a magnet for foreign visitors. It was often called the “Paris of the East”, a label that captured its cafés, dance halls, department stores and fashion. It also attracted less flattering descriptions, reflecting its gangs, opium, prostitution and extreme inequality. The Bund was the stage set for the first image: a line of banks and hotels facing ocean liners and warships in the river, with rickshaws, trams and cars on the road in front.
For many Chinese, though, the Bund stood for humiliation. It was the most visible expression of foreign economic power on Chinese soil, and after the May Thirtieth Movement of 1925, when Settlement police shot dead Chinese demonstrators on Nanking Road, it became a focus for nationalist anger. That tension shapes one of the Bund’s most enduring legends.
The Public Garden and the sign
It is widely believed in China that a sign at the entrance to the Public Garden read “No dogs or Chinese allowed”. The historical record is more complicated, and the most careful study, by the historians Robert Bickers and Jeffrey Wasserstrom in The China Quarterly in 1995, concluded that no sign with that exact wording has been shown to have existed.
What did exist was a board of park regulations. Photographs and the Municipal Council’s own records show versions of these rules; the 1917 version, for example, began with “The Gardens are reserved for the Foreign Community”, and a separate rule stated “Dogs and bicycles are not admitted”. Chinese people, apart from servants accompanying foreigners, were in practice excluded from the park from its early years, with the exclusion formalised in the 1880s. Chinese residents and organisations protested for decades, and the park was finally opened to Chinese visitors, on payment of a small fee, in 1928.
So the famous wording is a legend, but the discrimination it summarises was real. Bickers and Wasserstrom argued that the story became a powerful symbol precisely because it condensed genuine grievances into a single, memorable phrase. The scene in Bruce Lee’s film Fist of Fury (1972), in which the hero smashes such a sign, fixed the image for later generations. The park, renamed Huangpu Park after the Second World War, now contains the Monument to the People’s Heroes, built in the 1990s. The story fits into the wider narrative discussed in this site’s article on the “century of humiliation”.
War comes to the Bund
When fighting between Chinese and Japanese forces broke out in Shanghai in August 1937, the Bund was hit on its most notorious day. On Saturday 14 August 1937, Chinese Nationalist aircraft attempting to bomb the Japanese cruiser Izumo, moored off Hongkou, released bombs that fell on the crowded Nanking Road beside the Cathay and Palace hotels, and on the Great World amusement centre, where refugees had gathered. Estimates of the dead vary widely, commonly between about 1,200 and 2,000 across both sites, with many more injured. The day became known as “Bloody Saturday”. (It is separate from the famous photograph of a crying baby, also known as “Bloody Saturday”, which was taken after a Japanese air raid on Shanghai South Station on 28 August.)
After the battle the Settlement survived as an island surrounded by Japanese-occupied territory. On 8 December 1941, hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese forces moved in. The British gunboat HMS Peterel, anchored off the Bund, refused to surrender and was sunk, while the American gunboat USS Wake was captured. In 1943 Britain and the United States gave up extraterritoriality in China by treaty, and the Settlement formally came to an end, though foreign firms returned to the Bund after 1945 for a few final years.
1949 and the nationalisation of the buildings
The People’s Liberation Army took Shanghai in late May 1949. Photographs of soldiers sleeping on pavements rather than requisitioning homes became part of the Communist story of disciplined liberation. Chen Yi became the city’s first Communist mayor; a bronze statue of him now stands near the Nanjing Road junction.
Foreign firms did not leave at once. Many hoped to keep trading, but faced taxes, labour disputes and the loss of business as China turned towards the Soviet Union and the Korean War brought trade embargoes. Historians have used the phrase “hostage capitalism” to describe how firms were often unable to leave until they had settled their obligations, sometimes by surrendering their assets. Jardine, Matheson withdrew from mainland China in 1954. HSBC handed over its Bund building to the Shanghai government in 1955, and it became the headquarters of the municipal government. Other buildings became offices for state enterprises and government departments; the Customs House continued as a customs house, and Sassoon House reopened in 1956 as the Peace Hotel. Many financial institutions moved their Chinese operations to Hong Kong, and the statues of foreign figures that had lined the waterfront were removed.
The Mao-era Bund
For three decades the Bund was a government district rather than a financial one. Its buildings were used as offices, many interiors were subdivided and ornamental features were covered up. During the Cultural Revolution, the mosaics in the old HSBC entrance hall were plastered over, which ironically protected them, and the Customs House clock stopped playing the Westminster chimes in favour of the revolutionary anthem “The East Is Red”. The waterfront was used for mass rallies and parades.
For ordinary Shanghainese, many of whom lived in crowded housing, the riverside also served as public space. In the 1970s and 1980s the long flood wall became known as the “lovers’ wall”, because courting couples with nowhere private to go lined up along it in the evenings. After several serious floods caused by typhoon surges, the city built a much higher flood wall in the 1990s, raising the promenade well above the road and changing the Bund’s appearance.
Reopening in the reform era
As reform took hold, Shanghai’s leaders set out to restore the Bund as a financial district. In August 1994 the city issued provisional regulations on the replacement of public buildings on the Bund, and a state company was set up to take back buildings from government offices and lease or sell them to banks, insurers and other businesses. The municipal government moved out of the former HSBC building in 1995. HSBC did not reach an agreement to buy it back, and in 1997 the Shanghai Pudong Development Bank moved in; during renovation the mosaics were rediscovered and restored. According to a 2014 account in the Xinmin Evening News, by 1999 nineteen buildings along the Bund had changed hands, fourteen of them to financial institutions.
In 1996 the Bund’s historic buildings were listed together as a major national protected site. At the same time, the road along the Bund was widened to ten lanes, removing much of the old riverside parkland, and the ferry piers that had long connected the Bund with Pudong were largely removed. Across the river, the development of Lujiazui gave the Bund a new role as a viewing platform for the skyline of Pudong, whose construction is the subject of a separate article on this site.
The 2010 renovation
The biggest physical change came with preparations for the 2010 World Expo. From 2008 the city demolished the elevated expressway exit that had dominated the southern end of the Bund at Yan’an Road, removed the historic Waibaidu Bridge for restoration and reinstalled it in 2009, and rebuilt the road in two levels, with a tunnel carrying most through traffic underground. The space freed at the surface was used to widen the waterfront promenade and create pedestrian squares. The renovated Bund reopened on 28 March 2010, shortly before the Expo began.
Several of the old buildings reopened around the same time in new guises. Sassoon House returned as the Fairmont Peace Hotel after a three-year renovation; the old Shanghai Club at No. 2 became the Waldorf Astoria; and the former British consulate compound at the northern end was restored, with the Peninsula Hotel built beside it. In 2025 the Peace Hotel’s owners announced a renovation after which it is due to be rebranded as a Raffles hotel.
The Bund today
Today the Bund is Shanghai’s showpiece. The facades are floodlit every evening, tour boats ply the river, and luxury brands, restaurants and banks occupy the buildings. The waterfront attracts crowds that can be enormous on holidays, with tragic consequences on 31 December 2014, when a crush near Chen Yi Square during New Year’s Eve celebrations killed 36 people. Crowd controls have since been tightened.
The Bund’s meaning remains layered. Official accounts present it as a museum of “architecture of ten thousand nations” and as proof of Shanghai’s revival, while also recalling the foreign privilege and national humiliation it represents. For many visitors it is simply one of the great urban set pieces of the world. The buildings themselves have outlived the empires, firms and governments that built and used them, and have been adapted to each new regime in turn, which may be the best summary of their history.
A note on sources
This article draws on Robert Bickers and Jeffrey Wasserstrom’s 1995 study of the park sign in The China Quarterly; recent research on the Bund’s origins in the journal Urban History; Shanghai local gazetteer material on the 1845 Land Regulations; the Xinmin Evening News on the 1990s building replacement programme; Chinese government records of the 1996 heritage listing; contemporary and historical reporting, including the Los Angeles Times, China Daily and Virtual Shanghai, on the Customs House clock, the HSBC mosaics and the events of 1937 and 1941; and published architectural histories of individual buildings. Casualty figures for 1937 are estimates, and the story about the Bank of China building’s height is unverified.
